Today I heard from David Benson that Jack Morava died yesterday. This comes as such a huge shock that I can’t help but hope Benson was somehow misinformed. Morava has been posting comments to the ...

Quick question. Classically the harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian is often written 1 2 ( p 2 + q 2), while quantum mechanically it gets some extra ‘ground state energy’ making the Hamiltonian ...

These are some lecture notes for a 4 1 2 -hour minicourse I’m teaching at the Summer School on Algebra at the Zografou campus of the National Technical University of Athens. To save time, I am ...

Despite the “2” in the title, you can follow this post without having read part 1. The whole point is to sneak up on the metricky, analysisy stuff about potential functions from a categorical angle, ...

I’ve been blogging a bit about medieval math, physics and astronomy over on Azimuth. I’ve been writing about medieval attempts to improve Aristotle’s theory that velocity is proportional to force, ...

Axiomatic Set Theory 1: Introduction Posted by Tom Leinster Next: Part 2 I’m teaching Edinburgh’s undergraduate Axiomatic Set Theory course, and the axioms we’re using are Lawvere’s Elementary Theory ...

In Part 1, I explained my hopes that classical statistical mechanics reduces to thermodynamics in the limit where Boltzmann’s constant k k approaches zero. In Part 2, I explained exactly what I mean ...

This says that N! N! is the Laplace transform of the function xN x^N. Laplace transforms are important statistical mechanics. So what is this particular Laplace transform, and Stirling’s formula, ...

Posted by John Baez I keep wanting to understand Bernoulli numbers more deeply, and people keep telling me stuff that’s fancy when I want to understand things simply. But let me try again. The ...

I’m a little bemused by the popularity of the Galois theory notes. I’ve made quite a few sets of course notes public before, e.g.: Fourier analysis General topology Linear algebra Category theory But ...

When is it appropriate to completely reinvent the wheel? To an outsider, that seems to happen a lot in category theory, and probability theory isn’t spared from this treatment. We’ve had a useful ...